State estimation plays an important role in real time security monitoring and control of power systems. There are many problems in the implementation of state estimator for large scale networks due to measurement errors, weights given and the numerical ill-conditioning associated with the solution techniques. In this paper a new formulation using linear programming approach is presented. The formulation is devoid of weights and errors associated with the measurements are taken care of in constraints. The non linear problem is linearized at previous operating state and constraints are set up using flow mismatches. The implementation of the formulation exploits sparse features of the network matrices and avoids matrix inversions. Upper bound optimization technique is employed to solve the linear programming problem. Illustration of the proposed approach on sample 3-bus and 6-bus systems and a practical Indian Southern grid 72 bus equivalent system are presented.
